Every business has customers they do not want. Just ask the 331-year-old private bank in London’s Strand, Coutts and Co. They didn’t want to have Donald Trump’s friend, Nigel Farage as a customer any longer. So, they told him they were closing his account and that he would need to open a bank account elsewhere.
Then the heavens opened because “Noisy Nigel” is not one to take a decision against him without creating a fuss. His rejection by Coutts led the news agenda in the UK for several days. Even the Prime Minister stepped into the argument supporting Mr Farage.
The Coutts CEO apologised and confirmed that the company had offered to transfer Mr Farage’s accounts to its sister bank, NatWest. They would not leave him without banking. It’s just that Coutts did not want him. Noisy Nigel, though, is not one to avoid making himself the centre of the nation’s thinking. So, he used legal powers to get documents from Coutts to establish why they had got rid of him.
I’m not a bank manager, but I wouldn’t have Nigel as a customer. His behaviour in the past week shows he is a fusspot who wants the world, it seems, to centre around him. Such a customer would take up too much of my time. Essentially, that’s what the Coutts documentation says. It shows that they had calculated that dealing with Nigel Farage would cost the company more time and money than could be paid for by the income he would generate. The problem is that Coutts added some rather flowery language to its documentation, causing an almighty argument.
Banks get rid of customers every day. So do pubs who “bar” people from their establishments. Retailers have even taken out injunctions against people to prevent them from entering their stores. Businesses weigh up the risks to their company by dealing with certain people. If the risk is too high, they get rid of them.
A while back, I was awarded the contract to produce a Europe-wide science newspaper. My customer was a prestigious German publishing company. I was very proud to have been chosen by them to work on their publication. However, by the time I got to the third edition I realised I couldn’t carry on. They were making so much fuss over tiny little things, that I was spending too much time on the contract compared with the reward. So, I flew out to Dusseldorf and sacked them. They were shocked. “Surely you need us?” they asked. They felt that an independent editor would need the work and would be delighted to work with them. I replied to their question by saying, “What I do not need is all the hassle.”
I had decided to get rid of my customer based on a calculation a freelance journalist friend had once shown me. It was “P=(F-C)/HF”. That’s “Profit” equals “Fee” minus “Costs” divided by “Hassle Factor”. The higher the “Hassle Factor” the lower the profits will be. You would hope that Coutts might have a more sophisticated method of calculation than this. However, the documentation released by Nigel Farage doesn’t suggest so. There was quite a lot of emotion in the decision by Coutts – and that is why it can be so easily challenged.
If you get rid of a customer, there may not be as much fuss as was created by Nigel Farage, but you could still get negative publicity on social media. If your decision to get rid of customers is not based on some kind of algorithm, then you open yourself up to trouble.
In my academic role, one of the most upsetting parts of the job is deciding whether to get rid of students. Some students do not engage with their courses. Others struggle academically. We could make an emotional decision just to end the studies of such students. But that would just open us up to appeals, social media attacks and so on. Instead, we use published regulations and an algorithm. Students know in advance that their continuation as a student depends upon them achieving specific outcomes. Those who do not engage or cannot cope with the intellectual level of activity will be unlikely to meet those predetermined outcomes. Ending the studies of such students – getting rid of them as customers of the university – is therefore inevitable and there is unemotional documentary evidence to support the decision.When I got rid of my German customer, my simple calculation helped me decide. True, the “hassle factor” is not well defined. However, there would be ways for companies to create a more precise method. One such way is the use of “Decision Trees”. These are flow charts that help you decide what action to take in specific circumstances. In my university job, we are using a simple decision tree when we decide on the progression of students through their degree. For Coutts, though, it would seem that there was no transparent decision tree or algorithm by which customers would know before their potential fate. Had there been one, the company would not have been in such a pickle this week. And the rest of us would not have had to suffer yet more bleating from Noisy Nigel.
